The Vampire Diaries 5.20 “What Lies Beneath”

Harrison Ford being evil? Amber Valetta being dead? Michelle Pfeiffer being terrorized? These things are worthy of such a creepy title. This episode? Not so much.

Sure, the whole team decamps to a woodsy cabin for ghostly hijinks. But thank goodness they didn’t opt for “Cabin in the Woods” as the movie title of the week instead, because this show has lost all grasp of even the most basic rules of horror. Or its own rules of the supernatural. Or the personalities of the characters it has been building with these actors over the seasons.

The cabin is Caroline’s father’s, and she loved her dead queer dad. Sure, he tortured her for being a vampire for a while. But he came around before he died, letting himself ossify without becoming a true vamp himself. You’d think she’d have a memory or two while hiding out from gypsies in his cabin. But no, she’s all fixated on whether or not Stefan and Elena are doing it again.

Stefan and Elena, who established their post-breakup friendship last week, are all fixated on keeping Damon from finding out that Stefan killed Enzo. Even though he didn’t, as technically Enzo killed himself (while his emotions were off). He just used Stefan’s fist to do it; arguably a guilt-mitigating factor.

Meanwhile, Bonnie is lying to Jeremy that the end of the Other Side won’t mean her end as well. She says Liv is helping her come up with a new spell, but the real Liv is all like “yeah, bad mojo, girl, I’m out!” Which makes Liv smarter than everyone else on the show, including her brother Luke, who agrees to keep the travelers obfuscated about the vampire camping trip even though he only actually liked Katherine and vice versa.

Of course he fails, because Enzo apparently attacks him. Dead Enzo. Who now, unlike every other ghost on the show ever (since the Other Side yadda yadda yadda) can now touch things? Like stakes and matches and Elena’s head when she dares to take a bath in a big old tub. Not only is this not fair, it renders Luke’s witchiness useless, because what witch has ever let himself be bested by a ghost, decaying Other Side or not? A good witch (as Liv and Luke have been shown to be) has about a million ways of dealing with a ghost; they don’t end up unconscious in a barn that Enzo sets ablaze.

There are two good things in this episode. Jeremy and Matt torture Tyler to get his Traveler soul rider to confess. They know that Tyler’s hybrid wolf-vamp body is pretty unkillable, and they exploit that like the last two humans left in town, which they are. They also briefly find where the Travelers have been keeping their bodies (I knew it!), though as usual the show doesn’t exploit this creepy cavernous scenario.

The other good thing is Damon, who finds out about Enzo pretty quickly, doesn’t lose his mind, and acts more like his occasionally rational (if never less than self-serving) self for the first time in weeks. This is the Damon that is almost likable, the one that you can understand Stefan being loyal to and (since he also looks like Ian Somerhalder) Elena being unavoidably drawn to.

But then they stand around lazily packing up when the Travelers find them, as if that clearly wasn’t going to happen from the minute Luke was knocked out.

This show really needs to stop being too dumb to believe and actually surprise us with something other than silly love games again.